Multimodality and Visual Literacy in the Spanish Language classroom: analysis of a written production activity

Abstract: This paper aims to analyze the multimodality and visual literacy of Spanish language students enrolled at the Language Center from the State University of Ceará (UECE), Fortaleza-CE, Brazil, by making meanings in written productions based on a selected multimodal text for comprehension. The corpus consists of eighteen texts written by students studying Spanish, and the texts were analyzed in the light of theoretical principles of multimodality and visual literacy theory proposed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996, 2006) regarding to metafunctions and image analysis, as set forth in The Grammar of Visual Design. In this regard, we intend to show how the production of texts may reveal signs of students' visual literacy in the contexts of teaching and learning in Spanish language classes.